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Nash as the Greatest Car in the World, but not the Greatest Nash

JF Ptak Science Books Post 363

Nash / Lafayette Motor Car Company exhibited nine of their cars in a tower o f plate glass at the "Century of Progress" World's Fair in Chicago in 1933/4. The brilliantly colored cars (I guess we don't think of them as such if we are younger than 80 and have only seen these automobiles in black and white movies) must have looked spectacular in their glass enclosure, a sight probably not too many people had ever seen before.

The real feature for me though in this little post-card like publication was the interior image of the Twin Ignition Nash (1934 model) that, for some reason or other, was depicted as an enormous, invasion-from-outer-space sized car better than 200 feet long.

In any event, it is a delightful image, and by god's baggy pants, the Nash was a beautiful car. But it wasn't the most beautiful or the most impressive in the panoply of sui generis Nashs: that I do believe belongs to John Forbes Nash, the 1994 Nobel Laureate (economics, and no offense intended to Charles W. Nash), mathematical genius and schizophrenic and best popularly known as the mind in Sylvia Nasser's A Beautiful Mind (and by the four-time Oscar winning movie of the same name).